Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons is going out of its way to be hard to find your way around. Developer Invoke Studios is removing traditional quest markers from the game, and the general manager, Dominic Guay, told IGN that the decision is about giving players room to be curious.
The game will still have a compass you can turn off, but nothing more. Guay explained the reasoning directly: “We wanted them to engage with the world, to figure things out and feel that when they found things, it was based on their actions and not just blindly trusting a waypoint.”
The Quest Marker Problem
Quest markers are supposed to make games easier. They tell you exactly where to go, and that is the point. But Guay and his team have worked on open-world games before, and they saw a pattern develop. Players stop thinking for themselves once the marker appears.
Guay said that it is normal that a lot of players will just blindly follow the waypoint, and then you lose that agency, you lose that feeling of curiosity because you’re like, well, why even bother?
Mysteries Instead of Quests
Instead of traditional quests, Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons uses something called “Mysteries.” These are structured like a light immersive sim, where players gather clues by talking to townspeople and asking for rumors. The idea is that you stumble across things organically, rather than being directed to them.
Guay described how the system works in practice. There are multiple entry points, and depending on how you find them, the way you interact changes. You can stumble upon a mystery from a completely different place, which leads you toward a settlement, and you’ll know before you arrive that something fishy is going on. So you approach that settlement differently than if you learned about it from within.
What Could Go Wrong
The system sounds clever on paper. But the devil is in the details. If every person you speak to starts spouting the same clues, the illusion of discovery collapses. Players might end up feeling just as coddled as they would with glowing map markers.
Invoke Studios has to balance two competing impulses:
- Give players enough information to feel like they are making progress.
- Keep the clues subtle enough that the discovery feels earned.
Why Now Is a Good Time to Talk About This
Invoke Studios has a topical moment to make this argument. The decision to remove waypoints is part of a broader shift away from heavy-handed design. The company has been lucky to have a reason to talk about this at all.
Gamescom and the Spellcaster Hook
The game showed strong momentum at Gamescom, where it leveraged the prospect of playing a spellcaster with interesting interactions and swanky-looking combat. That momentum is part of what has shifted the writer’s position from skepticism to cautious optimism.
The PS5 Exclusive That Got Away
The waypoint decision makes the writer feel a lot better about not getting the PS5 exclusive Wolverine. The comparison to that project is implicit in the piece, and the writer frames the waypoint decision as a relief.
What the System Needs to Work
For the mystery system to succeed, it has to feel natural. Players need to believe they are finding things out on their own. If every passerby talks about a sinister basement, the game loses the effect.
The compass is the only concession to convenience. Everything else is on the player.
The Verdict on Waypoints
Waypoints are a convenience, but they are also a trap. They remove friction, and friction is what makes exploration feel rewarding. Guay’s team has decided that the cost of waypoints is higher than the benefit.
That is a bold bet. The test will be whether Invoke Studios can keep the clues varied enough that each discovery feels like a personal win. If they can, this could be a genuinely fresh way to play a Dungeons & Dragons game. If they cannot, it will be a frustrating way to get lost.
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